


what's going on

by hellbrain420



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Embarrassing Mother, Friendship of the budding middle-school variety, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-19
Updated: 2012-08-19
Packaged: 2017-11-12 10:48:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/490051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellbrain420/pseuds/hellbrain420
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some folks just need a punch in the face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what's going on

**Author's Note:**

> I dare anybody to find the obscenely obscure Calvin and Hobbes reference in here.

Your mother looks at you over her mug of sixteen year old Pu-er straight from the terraced hills of the Yunnan province. She isn’t going to ask you about anything because the principal has already called her and made sure she knows exactly what happened; he made a big show of dialing his office phone and explaining everything in pompous detail in front of you, just to let you know how deep in trouble you were. You mother is classy, and she is above petty stupid things like that. Instead of broaching the subject, she will sit in your suburban kitchen at an oak table, looking like a wolf in a doghouse, which is to say, incredibly out of place—too cold and perfect for domesticated life. She will watch you with her unnatural purple-pink eyes, eyes that you share with her, as you stomp in and wipe at your nose with your sleeve, wincing when you put too much pressure too close to your perfect hand-shaped bruise. She will not ask why you broke Tommy Chestnut’s nose by the bike racks after school because she knows you would never do something like that unless you had a damn good reason—she raised you better than to let your fists fly at the slightest emotional provocation. She will be there, sitting, sipping her ocean-smell tea, as you kick your way up the stairs and into your room, hopelessly flopping over your bed and cuddling whatever cat happens to have staked out residence in your closet today. You mother never asks; she _demands_ in a silent, demure way that nobody can resist. 

Over a dinner of salad and croissant—‘breakfast is golden, lunch is silver, and dinner is poison, Roxy, remember that now’—she watches you in a way that implies nothing is wrong. You just have to break down and let her know everything. 

“Sooo…I’m suspended for a week.” You say after you realize that there are only a finite number of times you can push the cherry tomatoes around in your bowl while not raising suspicions. Not that your mother’s weren’t raised since the moment Mister Nsinksi called her up. Probably before, given her near-omnipotent knowledge of your life. 

“Oh, really?” She asks lightly, politely dabbing at her lipsticked mouth even though for a woman like her it is not physically possible to get lettuce stuck in her teeth, let alone for her to smudge her makeup. It is more of a politely interested gesture than anything else. “What could have spurned this on? Could it, in any way, be directly connected to your black eye?” 

“Psh, you should see the other guy.” You snort. She does not appreciate your humor and lets you know this with a monotonous look that says to get on with it already. “Um, well, I punched somebody in the face and sort of broke his nose. But…but only a tiny bit.” 

“Thank goodness that you only broke his nose a _tiny_ bit.” You want to tell her to shut up, but you refrain. 

“He deserved it, of course.” 

“I’m sure he did.” 

You look at her discreetly, wondering if you should tell her the reason Tommy Chestnut totally got what was coming for him. Before you can really decide—you were leaning toward no—she shows that she already knows, which doesn’t surprise you, because as stated before, your mother pretty much knows everything. 

“It’s good to stand up for your friends.” She says in a way that would be wistful if she ever dared to interject her words with emotion. Then she excuses herself from the table and retreats to her study, leaving you with dish duty. 

*

Tommy Chestnut called Jane Crocker a fat cow after school, which made her big blue eyes get a little too liquid, and then you pinned him to the bike rack and punched his face until your knuckles hurt. There. That’s what happened. His friends pulled you off and one half-heartedly slugged you in the face, resulting in your black eye that you are now wearing like an exotic trophy or particularly nice silk tie, but they were all too scared of you to do much more. It was all worth it, especially the part where you smeared the blood off the back of your hands against the grass, because of the way Jane just stood there, looking at you in awe. It made you feel like all of the original Power Rangers at once, and perhaps a few of the newer batches as well. It was like…you were the hero and she was the adoring public. You were Spiderman, she was Gwen Stacy…wait, no, bad idea; she was Mary Jane. Superman and Lois Lane. Batman and Robin—either Grayson or Todd, because those scaly green underwear they wore were the best, and you will never forgive Drake for ditching that fashion. You coasted by on that feeling as teachers, bus drivers, and even a lunch lady or two collected around the scene of righteous justice. It got you through Mister Nsinksi trying to calmly explain to you that no matter what Tommy Chestnut may or may not have said, it was not worth breaking the poor boy’s nose over. The feeling was so strong you weren’t even nervous when he suspended you for a week. You just remember floating out of his office, face aching and bruising, and feeling like you had just discovered the last surviving unicorn and it agreed to be your personal escort. You even checked behind the bike rack, just to see if Jane might still be there, and of course she wasn’t; the buses had left some time ago. You told the staff that you were walking to the library across the street to wait for your mother to pick you up, but really you walk home; gotta burn off this adrenaline somehow. 

The feeling doesn’t last long enough to make staying home for an entire week and studying with your mother okay. No matter how repressively proud she is of you for helping a friend out, she is not going to let you slack off on your schoolwork. You spend too much time in the room that, in most people’s houses, is the living room or den, but your mother immediately turned into a library when she moved in. The walls are entirely covered in shelves, and the shelves are stocked in books, under half of which are in semi-modern English (semi-modern for you means happening after the 1960s, but still). It feels like a slice out of a Gothic European cathedral in there, complete with stain glass windows that reek to high heaven with bittersweet nostalgia—your mother had those installed shortly after your second birthday, custom made and depicting orange lizards and a multitude of frogs and even what looks like black lipstick crossed with a chainsaw. Your mother is so melodramatic sometimes, you swear to God. 

As fun as the library can be when left to explore it of your own volition, when your mother stands over your shoulder in a smart white and lavender dress, tapping her fingers on her arm, and makes sure that you keep your nose glued into the tome she has set in front of you that boils the French and Indian War down to the very last details of which way the fresh spring daffodils were growing, there is nothing you despise quite as much. The moment you make any move to suggest that you do not understand anything, she will launch into a Bible-long in-depth analysis of it. When you go back and figure it out for yourself, you are amazed to find out that she has everything right. Your mother has a creepy way of knowing everything, even things that she probably shouldn’t be able to. Things like when the phone is going to ring, when you two are going on a trip to the city because the Jehovah’s Witnesses are sharking the neighborhood, when somebody is in trouble (and also which airline is offering the cheapest tickets so she can fly to Southeast Asia to help). On Wednesday, halfway through your week of solitude, she knows when to open the door before the doorbell is rung. The unexpected act of precognition snatches a startled little noise from your guest, and even in the library, you can recognize immediately that it is Jane. 

Up until this point, you and Jane have been strictly school friends. You eat at lunch together, play at recess together, and snicker about how the librarian’s hairstyle is reminiscent of a perfectly swirled dog poo together. You like her a lot, sure, but you have never been comfortable meeting people outside of school. Mostly because that means a friend-to-be could meet your mother and your mother holds no scruples of scaring away children she does not like. All you can do as you sit in the library, no longer able to focus your eyes on the pages before you, is think that oh shit, Jane Crocker is currently talking to your mother. Her childhood is as well as gone now. 

You hear your mother invite Jane in, saying pointedly that you still have ten minutes of study left until you can come out. You only have five, but your mother says it in a way that shows she knows you are listening, and that you will not argue over the readjusted time. She probably wants to have a decent chance to probe Jane’s brain and determine whether or not her approval is needed. You love your mother, sure, but sometimes she is impossible. 

They enter the kitchen. Your mother offers Jane something to drink, maybe hot chocolate? It _is_ getting cold out. Oh, yes please, Ms. Lalonde. (You grimace at this, because you know what your mother is going to say; it’s what she always says and it never ceases to be any less embarrassing.) 

“Ms. Lalonde? Hm, that’s dangerously domestic,” You hear your mother say as she goes to boil water and get mugs out of the cupboard. “You should call me Rose. I find it much more appropriate. And now, what’s your name?” 

You stew amongst your books and papers and sparkly glitter pens, hopelessly bogged down in the clutches of preteen angst. Your mother is going to terrify sweet little Jane and scare her away, leaving you in the stuffy library forever without any giddy feelings of herodom to use as incentive. Jane will discover that you come from a horrifying family, the sort that delights in back-handedly boasting intelligence. She is going to think you are bred from sly people, and maybe you are, but she’ll make assumptions and then The End. Kaput. You’ll have punched Tommy Chestnut in the face for nothing. 

After ten minutes, you slog into the kitchen. You smile in hopes that a smile can patch up whatever your mother has said. You heard snippets of their conversation but not the whole thing, so for all you know Jane has been subjected to your mother’s antiquated monologues about wizards or whatever. 

“Oh, hello there, darling.” Your mother greets as you enter the kitchen. She only calls you darling when she’s been having too much fun. “A friend of yours stopped by, requested to see you. I’ll leave you two alone now…” She glides out and Jane watches her go with wide eyes before turning to you. She doesn’t seem scared, which is good.

Jane isn’t the best with words and you know it. You stand in front of her a tad bit blankly while she stumbles over a sincere thank you for what you did, but it quickly turns into concern when she really looks at your eye. 

“I hope it doesn’t hurt too much…” She looks like she’d like to reach out and put a bandaid on your face. If you had any bandaids, you would totally give her one, but you don’t. 

“Eh.” You shrug. “It was worth it.” 

Her face lights up. “Really? You mean it?” 

“Totes.”


End file.
